The experience of reading a novel that's doing something formally unusual — unreliable narrator, non-linear timeline, second-person narration — is different the second time you read it than the first. The first time you're learning the rules of the novel's world. The second time you already know the rules and can see how they're being applied.

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin uses second-person narration ('you do this, you go there') that readers either accept immediately or resist throughout. On first reading, the question of why the narration is second-person is open. On rereading, when you know the answer, the second person becomes what it was always meant to be — an act of dissociation that the character uses to survive what she's experiencing.

Formal choices that seem arbitrary often have meaning that becomes apparent retrospectively. The rereading reveals the design.